and south on upper Broadway, guns on the Flatiron Building could reach
any important street or any place where dangerous crowds might
conceivably form. This eminence controlled both Madison and Union
Squares. The tower of Madison Square Garden, near-by, also was armed.
From it men could watch and reach any part of the East Side that was out
of reach of the detachments in the bridge towers. Uptown New York was
governed more easily still. The wide, geometrically regular streets with
many open squares, were overlooked by tall apartment buildings and
hotels that commanded long sweeps of avenue. As a result, many of the
city squares and smaller parts had no artillery in them at all, and
others had only half a battery.
The people knew that wherever they might move, they were within the
range of cannon that were loaded and ready. Their Citizens’ Committee
and their officials worked under guns. Every foot of their Great White
Way could be changed into a Way of Death at a moment’s notice. Their
women could not shop, their children could not play, except under the
menace of weapons.
Small need was there in New York City of the many placards and notices
warning the people against disorder. Every man’s eye was on every other
man; and had one plotted mischief or rebellion, there would have been a
hundred witnesses ready to suppress him, to betray him--anything to
prevent those steel devils in the city towers from setting death loose
in the streets!
X
THE PRICE THAT HAD TO BE PAID
Not until the City of New York actually was surrendered did the people
of the Middle and Far West become startled into a really acute
perception of the catastrophe that had fallen on the whole country.
Though they were fiery with patriotism and anger, and though they were
giving not only lavishly but extravagantly of their wealth and men, they
were free, unconquered and untouched. They had seen no invader. With a
suddenly freshened realization of the hugeness of the country, they had
attained the conviction that there was little danger that any foe
possibly could reach them from the Atlantic.
They were willing to defend the East with all that they had. They were
willing to toss to the air all their royal plans for the splendid future
that was all but built. They were the real America, and they were
willing to ruin themselves and die for America. But--the men of Chicago
were a thousand miles from an enemy. Three thousand miles separated the
men of the Pacific from the armed enemies in New England.
So their customary life and their business had continued. They continued
to work and barter and plan. The loss of the industries of New England
had made itself felt at once, but there was an enormous land left. Even
the locking of all the Atlantic and Gulf ports with the attendant
calamities could not wholly shatter their great web of trade.
_Pacific Remains Open_
Their commerce could go and enter through their own ports unimpeded, for
happily in this crisis there was no danger threatening from across the
Pacific.
Therefore, though the surrender of Boston had shaken them, it had not
terrified them. The great inland country clung to the belief that the
army would do something. During the enemy’s slow movement through
Connecticut in the advance toward New York, the people of the West
remained inspired by that hope, as men in past ages, stricken dumb by a
darkened Heaven and a smoking mountain, still clung to the belief that a
kindly miracle would interpose to save them, though the earth of their
market places was trembling under their feet.
That spiritual self-defense with which men armor themselves against
inevitable fates had not given way until the Administration announced
the surrender of the City of New York and its two great forts, with the
statement:
“The President assumes full responsibility. After a careful
examination of the situation in person, he issued orders, as
Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States, that
the army in the field should offer no opposition.”
Then the West began to fear with a great fear that its Pacific coast was
not safe, after all. It thought, appalled, that an enemy so formidable
and successful, confronting opposition so futile, might succeed in
breaking the defenses of the Panama Canal as easily as he had broken the
defenses of the Atlantic.
_Panama Canal Safe_
But the Panama Canal was being held. The United States fleet, having
failed to prevent the hostile landing on the New England coast, had
turned at once to defend the one vital spot that it could protect even
against superior numbers. That was the Caribbean entrance to the Canal.
It raced there under forced draught. It surprised and destroyed an
inferior force of cruisers and battleships that the enemy had stationed
there for blockade. Again it was mathematics. The foe, forced to assure
himself against attack on his transports off the New England coast, had
held all his powerful ships north of the American fleet. The weaker
blockaders in the South, facing guns of superior range, ships of
superior speed, and superior volume of gun-fire, went down to
destruction without even the satisfaction of biting hard as they died.
Now the country that had been sick with humiliation because its navy
would not fight, thanked Heaven that the fleet had kept itself intact:
that instead of going down in glorious disaster, it had worked out a
scientific problem coolly. The big navy, intact to its smallest torpedo
boat, was lying fully potent under the strong defenses of Limon Harbor.
The guns of the fortifications protected the ships, and the ships
protected the fortifications. Three thousand naval officers and sixty
thousand sailors and marines, added to the land forces in the defenses,
made a force of highly trained, completely efficient men.[149]
_The Defenses Perfect_
The defenses were perfect. This precious possession was one American
possession at least that could be held to the last. Its guns were fully
installed. It had ammunition. Its range finding systems and its systems
of fire control were complete. Without the navy, it, too, would have
been sorely weak in men and would have been open, like America’s
continental defenses, to attack from the land. But with the naval
forces, it was able to hold out.[150]
The navy was ready to throw men ashore to meet any attempt at landings
along the coast. The navy’s torpedo boats and destroyers crept to sea in
the night and guarded all weak places. The American submarines, with a
safe harbor for a base, worked under ideal submarine conditions. When
the hostile navy, freed from the task of protecting its army, at last
appeared in force off the Isthmus, it dared not institute anything like
a close blockade.
It dared not even venture in to bombard. There were 16-inch guns at
Panama. It was an object lesson for the United States. Exactly thus, had
there been an army to protect them, the Atlantic coast defenses could
have defied any attempt from the sea to force a harbor.
_Hostile Navy Powerless_
The enemy navy, overwhelming as it was, could do nothing except to wait
and watch. It cruised up and down, far out in the purple Caribbean. Its
only trophies in the South were Porto Rico and the United States Naval
station of Guantanamo in Cuba. It had taken the latter by the simple
method of steaming in, for this “naval station” was only an unfortified
harbor.[151]
The news of Panama’s safety was the first and only good news that had
been given to the country since the declaration of war. The relief that
it gave was so great that the people received almost with equanimity the
news which followed--that word had come from spies of the arrival of
more transports in Boston Harbor and Narragansett Bay, bringing forces
estimated at figures varying from 50,000 to 100,000 more men.
Soon after this landing had been accomplished, cavalry and light
artillery moved northward through Vermont. They seized and occupied in
force Bellows Falls and the White River, Wells River and St. Johnsbury
Junctions of the Vermont railroads. This cut the last communication of
New England with the United States. It gave the invader absolute command
of the St. Johnsbury and Lake Champlain Railroad, the Central Vermont,
the Maine Central, the Boston and Maine and the Rutland branch
railroads. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont were in his power like the
rest of New England. Blockaded from the sea, and cut off from railroad
connection with the interior, they were subjugated even without the
unfolding of forces that now began through their area.
Here, too, the invaders, despite their grown power, moved slowly,
cautiously. They cut districts from each other, and occupied them one
by one systematically, making united action by the population impossible
even had it been feasible. By the simple method of disorganizing all the
accustomed political and governmental affiliations, they turned to their
purpose the ever-present lack of coherence between State governments and
city governments, township authorities and County authorities. The
machinery fell apart; and the enemy dealt with the bits as he chose.
_The Conquest Complete_
The few big cities of the three States could offer no resistance. Within
a few days the conquest of all New England was complete. Not a word came
out of it to the rest of the United States. The City of New York was
equally sealed. Nothing was permitted to pass out of the gagged and
fettered town. The messages that stormed at it were delivered to censors
who did what they pleased with them, and passed practically none to the
persons for whom they had been destined.
In this sealed city, for the first time in men’s memory, there were no
crowds on the streets. Broadway from 59th Street to the Battery was
almost naked of people by day and by night. Its electric signs were
dark. Its hotels and theaters were all but dark.
Whenever, by chance, people found themselves in a given block in numbers
sufficient to make a throng, there always was a hasty scattering, as if
they feared to touch each other. As these little knots scattered, they
cast swift glances of apprehension at the high roofs.
There had been an official notice on the front pages of all the New York
newspapers on the morning after the occupation:
ALL ASSEMBLAGES OR GATHERINGS ON THE
STREETS ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN
By Order of the Military Government.[152]
There was no threat as to penalty for infraction. None was needed. The
machine guns in all the towers and sky-scrapers were sufficient warning.
The shape of the island on which the Borough of Manhattan lay, with
immensely long straight streets running north and south through its
narrow width, made it a simple matter to isolate all sections in which
there were populations who might become unruly. The crowded tenement
districts of the East Side were cut off from those in the West. They
were separated into units within themselves. Very soon, the soldiers
moved around the city with the ease of careless visitors. Officers,
mounted and in automobiles, went where they pleased. They paid
apparently no attention to the people, and these, in turn, could not
guess anything that the conquerors had in mind or what would be their
next act in the next minute.
_Surrounded by the Unknown_
The city’s newspapers, like those of Boston and all New England, were
controlled and edited by military censors. They were permitted to tell
their readers nothing of importance. This utter ignorance in which the
multitudes were kept, made them more helpless than did even the guns
that watched them everywhere.
It was a city surrounded, perpetually confronted and oppressed by the
unknown. The veil of secrecy and silence was lifted only when newspapers
or placards printed some new proclamation in formal, legal verbiage.
The first one to be issued had proclaimed the occupation, and the
institution of a Military Government. It had added that the existing
civil authorities had been empowered and ordered to continue their
administration with the sanction and participation of the Military
Government, and that all civil and criminal laws remained in effect
subject to changes demanded by military exigency.[153]
But immediately under this announcement was a paragraph headed:
LAWS SUSPENDED
On and after this date the following Classes of Laws are Suspended.
(1) The Right to Bear Arms. (2) The Right of Suffrage. (3) The
Right of Assemblage. (4) The Right to Publish Newspapers or
Circulate Other Matter. (5) The Right to Quit Occupied Territory or
Travel Freely in same.[154]
Another announcement that struck home after the people saw its real
meaning under its smooth wording was:
“The municipal and other civil and criminal laws as administered by
the civil authorities, are for the benefit and protection of the
civilian population. Their continued enforcement is not for the
protection or control of officers and soldiers of the Occupying
Army, who are subject to the Rules of War, and amenable only to
their own Military Government.”[155]
At first this announcement seemed to the citizens to be for their
protection, but the sharper readers soon pointed out that it was only a
skillful way of intimating that the soldiers were above all the laws
that controlled the conquered population.
_A Mysterious Flotilla_
A few days after the surrender, people along the water-front noticed a
great movement of vessels. The big Fall River Line and other Sound
steamers moved down the Upper Bay in long procession, with some
steamships seized at the wharves.
They were full of troops. Some of the vessels towed railroad floats with
flat cars on which were lashed cannon so big that even from the shore
the eye could perceive their unusual size. Other craft towed strings of
small scows, and still others towed floating derricks.
The flotilla passed down the Upper Bay, but it did not go out through
the Narrows. It disappeared in the narrow water-way of the Kill von Kull
that winds between Staten Island and the mainland of New Jersey, and
connects with the Lower Harbor through Raritan Bay.
The story of the mysterious flotilla spread quickly through a city whose
lack of newspapers made its apprehensive curiosity only the more keen.
Robbed of its news and bulletin service, the people, without any
conscious plan, had organized a news service of their own. They had
fallen back on the primitive method of circulating information from man
to man.
_New York’s “Bush Telegraph”_
Within twenty-four hours of the suppression of the liberty of its press,
the highly modern, highly artificial city had in operation the same form
of news-transmission that has so often puzzled and even awed travelers
in savage lands. Under the sky-scrapers the “bush telegraph” carried its
messages with almost the same astonishing swiftness as in the jungle.
It was done by hasty whispers and by furtive conversation, for among the
Orders and Regulations that were promulgated daily there was a little
warning that severe punishment would be inflicted on any person who
“spread false news, communicated the movement of land and sea forces,
made noises or uttered outcries of a nature to disturb troops, or
inspected, sketched, photographed or made descriptions of views on land
or sea without authority.”[156]
There were enough ominous elasticity and inclusiveness in this Order to
cover almost any exchange of words. Yet men, even though they were
mortally afraid while they did it, could not resist the human impulse to
transmit anything that they learned.
The news merely puzzled the great mass of the population. Accustomed all
their lives to turn to their newspapers for knowledge about everything,
they were quite helpless with their one means of enlightenment shut off.
_To Open the Harbor_
The Citizens’ Committee and the city officials, however, were able to
guess pretty clearly what this movement of troops and heavy artillery
meant. There was nothing in the lower harbor that possibly could demand
such force except one place--the forts on Sandy Hook, the last remaining
harbor defense that still was under the American flag. Solitary though
it was, so long as it remained intact it forbade the entrance of New
York Harbor to any hostile vessel.
There had been wonder before because the enemy commander had not
demanded the surrender of the Sandy Hook defenses under threat of
bombarding the city, as he had demanded and forced the surrender of
Forts Hamilton and Wadsworth.
“Because Sandy Hook is not within the city, as the other two forts
were,” was the solution at which the city’s lawyers arrived, after
considering the rules governing military action. “The invader plainly is
adhering carefully to all the accepted Rules of War. By doing so, he
can, and does, hold us to account rigorously under the same Rules. This
is profitable to him, for despite all their apparent stipulations in
favor of a conquered territory, the Rules of War are made, after all, to
facilitate war.”
It was impossible to warn the commander at Sandy Hook. Private service
over the telephone and telegraph systems was suspended entirely. The
fire alarm system was operated under the watchful control of soldiers.
In Police Headquarters sat a Colonel of Cavalry whose countersign was
necessary for every order issued by the Police Commissioner.
This was a stern officer, who held the police force in a hard, masterful
hand. The men were accountable more than ever for strict enforcement of
all laws, but they were subject also to summary control by every
military officer. Even guards and posts of private soldiers had some
authority over them.
There were many daily experiences and sights in their streets that
served to make the people tractable, but few things were so powerful as
the daily spectacle of their pugnacious police yielding sullen but
complete obedience.
“It is unlawful to disobey orders given by our army.” This short
regulation covered a great deal. It tied the police and the citizens
hand and foot.[157]
[Illustration: “The big guns behind them made no despicable
sentinels.”]
_Taking of Sandy Hook_
On Sandy Hook, fifteen miles down the harbor from the Battery, there
were being demonstrated the inexorable mathematics of war that had been
demonstrated at Narragansett, at Boston, at Forts Schuyler and Slocum in
Westchester, and at Fort Totten in Long Island.
Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, almost invulnerable to ship-attack from the
sea, was being reduced from the land. The fort commander had disposed
his men in the most formidable positions possible, and they made the
narrow sandy neck of the Hook that led from the mainland to their
fortifications a pass that no force, however contemptuous of death,
would attack hastily. Barb wire and great sand mounds, rapid fire guns
and big guns behind them, made them no despicable sentinels. But the
Americans numbered companies where the enemy numbered battalions and
regiments. The American mobile guns numbered pairs where the enemy’s
artillery was counted by dozens.
The steel mass of fort that could protect harbor and city could not
protect itself. The motley flotilla, emerging into Raritan Bay, landed
its men on the New Jersey shore at Keyport inside of the lower harbor,
and behind Sandy Hook. The defenses had not been devised or built to
withstand attack from their own bay. The great rifled guns and the steel
mortars were ponderous. They were mounted on complex engines, equally
ponderous, whose bases were firmly anchored in concrete and steel. These
mammoths were not things that could be swung around to all points of the
compass. They were set in their solid beds for the one purpose of
fighting things out at sea.
_The Open Back of the Fort_
The commander had succeeded, with desperate labor, by blasting away
concrete emplacements and facings, in turning two of his big guns around
to face the land and protect the open back of the fort. But the giant
steel guns with their 1,000-pound projectiles that could fight
30,000-ton battleships, could not fight little two-legged men. They
might, by chance of fortune, find and destroy one of the siege guns that
were attacking them. But if they missed a gun and fell merely among
soldiers, they would be scarcely more murderous than a little field gun
that fires bursting charges or shrapnel.
The enemy did not try to rush the works. He had time and means and did
not need to sacrifice men. To the heights of the Atlantic and Navesink
Highlands, that ascend so strangely out of the sea and out of the
flat-sea country there, he lifted guns of great caliber. He placed guns
in cover behind every undulation. When he had placed all these weapons
with scientific precision, they began to fire.
None of the mobile artillery installed for the defense of the fort
against land attack could reach the invaders’ heavier artillery with any
hope of effect. The men in the defenses, cowering under bomb-proofs and
in pits, held out for a day and a night. They held out for another day.
Then there was nothing left to defend. Dismounted and broken, their
armament was destroyed. The survivors surrendered.
New York City did not know that the Sandy Hook defenses had fallen till
three light enemy cruisers appeared in the upper bay and steamed through
the East River to the Navy Yard. Then the city knew that its harbor was
open.
_Enemy Invades New Jersey_
The army that took Sandy Hook did not return to New York. The flotilla
took the troops and their light artillery aboard at the Atlantic
Highlands, and steamed back through Raritan Bay, through the narrow
sound behind Staten Island and into Newark Bay. Here other boats met it
with cavalry and motor troops from Yonkers.
Troops landed at both sides of the entrance to the bay, taking Bayonne
and Elizabethport, with their oil refineries and tanks, and their ship
yards. Then the flotilla moved up the bay, and put great bodies of
soldiers of all arms ashore at the great factory town of Newark. A big
city, and a difficult city to control, it kept the commanders occupied
for three days before they had made their footing good; but then it was
an admirable and a vastly valuable base. From it the troops spread out
and took Rutherford, Passaic, Hackensack, and Paterson.
It was rich commercial territory that complemented the value of
possessing New York, for these factory cities were a part of the
Metropolitan District counted with New York City in every National
estimate of industrial wealth. This district contained almost thirty-two
thousand factories. In wealth and productiveness, it was as choice a
prize as New England.[158]
_Army Ceases Operations_
Having made good its hold on the new conquest across the Hudson River,
the invading army ceased to expand. Even with the accretion that had
been made to its forces, it had none to spare for further operations,
for it now had under its charge 62,000 square miles of domain with more
than thirty millions of people.
This was a Kingdom. The victor set himself to the task of organizing his
government, which meant the task of turning it to profit.
From the beginning, he had taught the conquered people that an invading
army lives on the country. Wherever his troops entered, the inhabitants
were ordered to supply all that was needed by men and horses.
The occupying troops demanded lodgings and stable-room. They demanded
accommodations for everything belonging to the army. They requisitioned
fuel and straw. They called for teams, cars, motors, wagons, boats, and
claimed the services of their owners. They occupied flour mills and
bakeries. They took machinery, material, tools and equipment for
repairing their munitions of war, bridges, and roads.[159]
In all the towns they seized parts of the hospitals and set them aside
for the care of their men, impressing the hospital attendants into the
service. For the use of their own medical service they forced the towns
to contribute drugs and medicines.